Tribal-style frog design

Black and grey · Flash

A frog in a climbing pose, with its limbs spread and toes splayed, is drawn as a solid black outline. White swirling curls and tendrils are cut into the black fill along the body, arms and legs, giving a tribal-style pattern. The design sits centred on a plain white background with no other elements.

Frog Swirl Tribal pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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Don't believe Harold when he says the big top is finished. We pulled the canvas down in Carlisle on Tuesday with four men and a lot of swearing, and the lorry wouldn't start, so we've been stuck behind the feed merchant's for two days eating tinned peaches. The frog is still with us. Mavis insists on carrying the tank herself, wrapped in a damp tea towel like a sick baby, and the frog, who we call Constable because he climbs the bars of his cage with such ceremony, hasn't eaten since Thursday.

You'll remember the act. He would climb the rope ladder I rigged between the two poles, all those splayed toes gripping and letting go, and the crowd in the front rows would gasp as if he might fall, which he never did. Last month at Penrith a boy of about seven stood up and shouted that the frog was painted, that it was cut from black card. Mavis laughed so hard she dropped the ladder. Nobody has ever asked me what the white curls on him are, only whether he's real.

Here's what I mean to do. Tonight, after the last lamp goes out in the empty field, I'm going to let him go by the river where the reeds are thick. Mavis says it's soft of me. I say it's sensible. We've no ring left to pay for him anyway, and a frog that good deserves a ladder nobody has to rig.

Write when you can. Send the address to the post office at Kendal, not the field.

Yours in the dust, Walter